Coaching staff, television announcers, analysts and fans have a great interest in understanding the nuances of a sporting event. Statistical records of manually enumerated data have been the longest standing approach for recording “what happened” during a sporting event, and have been the prevalent means for recording the capabilities of athletes. Performance is often measured by enumerated specific actions: baseball batter at bats (hits vs. outs), basketball player shots (made vs. misses), hockey goalie defense (goals vs. saves), and football running back (yards gains vs. carries). These actions may be annotated by observers who detect occurrences of the events and determine the results of the actions. These statistics only give a partial picture of the results of a game.
The use of low cost video solutions has become the standard for coaches and analysts to augment official data. Coaches and broadcast analysts may learn a lot from observing nuances of play surrounding specific actions. For example, these nuances may include a baseball batter swinging, a basketball player planting his or her feet during a shot, a goalie reacting during a shot and a running back identifying holes in the offensive line. Coaches often refer to footage of the games to get answers about what went right or wrong at particular parts of a game. It may be a laborious process to manually edit and analyze hours of footage in preparation for an upcoming game. For instance, assistant coaches of smaller collegiate programs may spend most of their time reviewing game footage of their own and opposing teams.
More recently, systems have become available to record the position, motion and pose of athletes participating in sporting events. The use of such systems has been growing in popularity among coaching staff in select sports. However, other sports have been slow to accept these systems because it may be not clear how the information benefits such organizations. Many coaches have difficulty relating the statistical information received with their analysis gathered from video. What is needed is a more coherent approach to integrate manual statistics, video and automated statistics.